(art) History

This is our second article this week. Posting two articles is only possible with the help of our readers. This week Miriam Frei kindly helped us out with an Article. Thank you so much! She writes a blog herself, please consider checking it out. Because her blog is in english so is this article. Her Blog will be linked at the end of the article. If you'd like to contribute to our blog like Miriam, write us an Email or reach out to us on any social media.

Art is pretty. A lot of us like to marvel at the beauty of a painting or to be puzzled by its experimental forms and ideas. Yet, art has a function that goes beyond its initial wonder: a tool for learning.
This can be for multiple things. To learn about yourself through the stories art tells you or to learn about others, to learn about history.

 
Stories with pictures, pictures with stories

Stories can be told in many ways. A lot of us first think of a regular novel with a bulk of text when we think of reading. With the addition of graphic novels and comics, however, a whole new world of storytelling opens up.
In comics and graphic novels pictures take up a lot of space if not taking up the central role of the story. Atmosphere, setting, emotions are conveyed through images.
Shaun Tan’s work is built upon the silent graphic novel. Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s novel Chopsticks sells itself as a novel told mostly through pictures. And the possibilities are endless.
 
Yet, it doesn’t stop there. The magic of storytelling through images goes beyond the page. Your “regular” artwork hanging in galleries and museums has that same spark when it comes to stories, it might just happen more subconsciously.
Any artwork tells you a story, real or fictional. It tells you the story of the person portrayed, maybe. It tells the story of the artist drawing it. Or, it tells you your story or the stories you have to create yourself.
This happens to me over and over again when I look at one of my favorite paintings: L’Absinthe by Edgar Degas. This painting tells you a thousand stories and every time you look at it, it tells you another one.

Paintings as resources

As a student of art history, I could write you pages and pages of occasions where established art historians or even us students use paintings as resources to both prove our thesis or to explain historical context.
I had this revelation just recently again when I was working for my module on Amsterdam during the Golden Age where I looked at food and its relation to the social lives of the people living there. Paintings helped me get to the information of how market places looked back then, what was served, who worked in the kitchen and on the fields. Historical painting is a resource to learn how certain events took place, learn about how they felt.
Yet, it also teaches us to look critically at all of it. Paintings, sculptures, all of that is loaded with symbolism and pathos. If you work in the art field, closely examining the accuracy of the portrayal will help you sharpen your skills.

Art as memories

Art will also sharpen your memory. It will give you the ability to empathizes with a memory, even a collective one, outside of your own experience.
This is especially prominent in photography, war photography only the most pressing of examples. It’s quite logical really. If you flip through your own pictures, memories come right back as well. Now, art lets you remember what you haven’t personally lived so you can use that knowledge for the better.
But any kind of artwork can do that, really.
In the last couple of months, the Black Lives Matter movement got international acknowledgment for their fight that has sadly been going for centuries.  

Artworks resurfaced, art was made, art was discussed too.
I personally turned towards Kara Walker, with her silhouettes that taught me more about slavery, the Civil War, Black power and the fight against racism than any history book will ever teach me. I turned to Faith Ringgold and her quilts, her memories of the Harlem Renaissance, slavery, tradition. I turned to Harmonia Rosales who challenges us with her reinterpretation of known Renaissance masterworks.
And I will once more turn to art to understand what is happening in present day, because art can help us think more critically as it challenges the concept of „winners writing history“ in giving another perspective to what is taught in history books, in teaching us to listen, to feel empathy.

Every artwork tells you a story and I hope you will listen.

 
‍Thanks again Miriam for this article! Here's her blog, check it out! https://betweenlinesandlife.wordpress.com

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